


Summers in Essos

by framboise



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Aunt/Nephew Incest, Brooding, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Love Confessions, Photography, Summer Vacation, Tenderness, Travel, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 05:11:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15574512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/framboise/pseuds/framboise
Summary: "If you wanted to take on some of the family business, you only needed to ask, nephew," she teases and he huffs and rubs a hand over his face. Does she know that he hates it when she calls him that? Hates it but also feels warmed by it, welcomed, since he's the only family she has left. It's just the two of us, she says when she's drunk sometimes, throwing an arm around his shoulder and she'll feel so small next to him, he'll feel like he's towering over her.





	Summers in Essos

**Author's Note:**

> **content notes: this is a modern AU where Jon and Dany are still nephew and aunt, and have been aged up to their mid/late twenties. This story contains a brief mention of Dany/OMC, UST, and an open/unresolved ending.
> 
> if you want visuals for this fic, I made a graphic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/176665613657/if-you-wanted-to-take-on-some-of-the-family)

 

 

 

“Don’t you feel a connection when you visit Dorne, something in your bones?” Dany asks, like clockwork, the first night they arrive in Essos on their annual summer trip, her pilgrimage to her childhood home and his three-weeks leave from his work in the north.

“No,” he says, twirling his cigarette around his fingers, brushing away the curl of incense that spirals upwards from the burner at the corner of their table on the balcony of one of the rickety hotels she makes them stay in.

She’s always searching for authenticity, his aunt, and in such a genuine way that if anyone else mocks her for it, for being a rich girl playing tourist, he shuts them down, hard.

Ostensibly he’s her photographer on these trips — documenting the charities her fund supports, taking photo after photo of her earnest face, eyes gleaming with tears or a smile so open and young it makes his chest hurt when he develops them in his dark room once he’s back north, aching for more than just the balmy warmth of a summer in Essos — but in reality he's so much more than that: her friend, bodyguard, chef, mopper-up of drunken tears and vomit, alarm clock, platonic boyfriend, nephew.

“Do you? Feel it the minute we get off the plane here?”

“Yes,” she says, stealing the cigarette from his fingers and putting it to her lips, bending over the candle to light it, her violet eyes glancing up at him and making his jaw clench.

She doesn’t mean for her looks, her casual touches, to mean something but they do. She flirts with him, like she does with everyone, man or woman, young or old, but it doesn’t mean anything - at least that's what he says to his cousin when he rambles drunkenly about it. Sansa is the only one he talks to vaguely about this burning in his gut, this wrongness, without ever coming out and saying the actual words, and it’s because she’s had her fair share of scandalous relationships, though nothing incestuous, he thinks bitterly, that’s just him. Although is it incest if they haven't actually _done_ anything, does it make his feelings for Dany any less wrong?

“It’s like coming home,” she says simply and sadly, and he brushes a finger across the back of her hand before she twists her wrist and squeezes his hand in hers.

He reaches to steal his cigarette back but she twitches her face away, smiling, and gets up to fetch something from inside their twin room.

“So where do you think home is for you, really?” she asks, emerging with a chocolate bar beaded with condensation from the mini-fridge.

“I don’t know, the north, I guess," he says, never comfortable when he has to sit and think about something like that, about his past. _You're very present_ , an ex-girlfriend had told him once, the tone of her voice implying it was an insult. "Why don’t you stay here in Essos all year round then?” A question he asks her every time. It’s their seventh - or eighth, he forgets - summer trip and sometimes it feels like they’re repeating every conversation, every scene—

The day she’ll announce that she’s going for a walk in the dunes and he’ll follow her only so that she doesn’t get lost or eaten by a jackal; the fancy dinner they’ll have in some old palace with the executives of various corporations and how she’ll get drunk and he’ll have to pinch her on the thigh under the table so she doesn’t start ranting about their unfair business practices and lose the remaining goodwill she has in the country; the morning she’ll take to her bed and refuse to leave, looking sad and young and so forlorn it makes him even more tender, makes him take a dozen trips out to ferry back things that might cheer her up - ice creams, trinkets, magazines, flowers; the dawn he’ll wake up chilled on the balcony because he abandoned their room when she brought someone back to have loud athletic sex with, sex that he heard as if he _was_ still in the room, sex that made him furtively wank himself off and then wipe his hand on the tiles of the floor and feel grimy and pathetic; the night they’ll go dancing with her Meereenese friends and she’ll grind up on him and drive him crazy, and then grind up on some other man which will result in Jon getting into a fight in the alleyway with that man or someone else unfortunate enough to cross him; the evening when they’ll have dinner under the stars near some camp in the desert, just the two of them still awake, and how the tension between them will thrum like a storm brewing, how she might sit in his lap and trace her fingertips across his eyebrows and down his nose as she calls him her dearest nephew, and how he’ll hate her and love her, and how he'll kiss her on her forehead so gently it hurts before retreating to his single sleeping bag—

"Because I'm needed back in King's Landing, you know that," she says with a sigh.

"You're too dutiful," he says, shaking his head, "you'll burn yourself out."

"Says you," she says, lifting her chin, kicking him lightly in the shin with her foot that he grabs and squeezes tightly so that she squeals and kicks him away harder and in the commotion he reaches over and steals the end of his cigarette, taking the last drag and then stubbing it out on the table while she clutches her foot and looks theatrically betrayed.

"If you wanted to take on some of the family business, you only needed to ask, nephew," she teases and he huffs and rubs a hand over his face. Does she know that he hates it when she calls him that? Hates it but also feels warmed by it, welcomed, since he's the only family she has left. _It's just the two of us_ , she says when she's drunk sometimes, throwing an arm around his shoulder and she'll feel so small next to him, he'll feel like he's towering over her.

"Tomorrow," he says, feeling the tiredness of the day creep up on him, not wishing to prolong tonight's torture - of her sitting opposite him in her tiny sundress, strap fallen over one shoulder, tendrils of humid hair curling around her flushed cheeks, "we'll set off after breakfast, _early_ breakfast," he says, raising an eyebrow. She's a late riser, except for those rare days when she's not and she's the one who gets to wake him up and drag him from his bed rumpled and half-naked. He hopes she finds it as frustratingly arousing as he does, but that's unlikely.

 

*

 

They're being driven back to the coastal hotel they're staying in, after a long day at the animal shelter she supports, and he can feel her upset like it's a physical thing, a cloud around her next to him in the backseat.

"You shouldn't let it get to you," he says, hypocritically, because he's not sure there's anyone who deals with criticism worse than he does, hence all that mess that had him chucked out of the Night's Watch, his body and his pride both bruised. Hence him cycling through half a dozen failed careers before settling on ranger in the isolated northern forests, with a sideline in photography for a select few clients, aka his friends and family, who know his ways well, and from whom he rarely asks for payment.

"He was right," she says of the man adopting a horse from the shelter who had scowled when he saw Dany and then said some pointed remarks about foreign charities, about how surely there were animals in King's Landing that might need her help, that Essos was just fine without her thank you very much.

"Missandei doesn't agree," he says, "and besides, this is your childhood home, the one you have the most connection to, your experiences here were what made you who you were."

"I relied on the kindness of so many strangers," she says, as if reciting the speech she gives at dinners and grand openings, "and now I want to repay that kindness tenfold."

"Exactly," he says, nudging her arm to make her smile. "Do you know what might cheer you up," he adds, unzipping his camera bag, "the photos I took of you feeding that vicious donkey. Your _face_ ," he says, handing over his camera and looking at her while she looks at the small screen, scoffing at how she appears to be wavering between polite professionalism and terror that she might have her hand bitten off.

"There's a metaphor there, don't you think, something about the hand that feeds," he says dryly and she gives him a dirty look and then lifts up his camera and takes a photo of him.

The pictures of him always startle him when he loads the images from his digital camera or develops the films from the others, slotted in haphazardly between rows and rows of her face that he pores over like some obsessive stalker. He always looks so happy in the photos, even though he knows that what he was feeling at the time was more often than not a brooding, aching tangle of love and bitterness and shame.

At the beach shack that the owner generously calls a villa, Jon locks his cameras and both their valuables in the safe before stripping off his clothes and putting on his trunks so he can join her in the sea, his heart racing as it always does when they're apart from one another and he worries for her. What if she drowns and he's not there to save her, the stupid animal part of his brain says.

She's lying on her back in the water, body rocked by the small waves, hair like bleached seaweed around her face.

He thinks about dunking her under the surface and then wisely decides not to, thinking that, just like that time he did the same to Sansa, he'll only have himself to blame for the vicious anger unleashed upon him. His time with the Starks, with the cousins that he knew as siblings, is a touchstone for him when dealing with other people, a vivid slice of eight normal years in a normal family, after he was taken in by them from his last children's home, and before he left for the madness of the Wall. Perhaps that was where his problems began, viewing cousins as siblings, his mind getting confused by relations and strangers and friends. Probably not.

"Have you got cream on?" he asks, paddling next to her like a faithful dog.

"Yes, dad," she says and he rolls his eyes at the world, at her particular choice of words.

"Do you?" she asks, legs dropping down so that she can tread water next to him, the sandy floor slightly too deep for both of them to touch.

"Nope," he says with a smile and she splashes water at him.

He grabs her waist in retaliation, feeling the slip of his hands across her bare skin, and her legs wrap around him like some unbearably lithe jellyfish.

She hooks her arms around his neck so he's swimming for the both of them and he hopes that his face looks annoyed rather than turned-on, her chest pressing against his, the thin strap of her bikini top looking perilously flimsy, her nipples hard through the tiny triangles, her stomach rubbing against his as they bob in the water.

"I think I'll do this when I'm on land too," she muses, "so you can walk me everywhere."

"You'd be too heavy," he says, watching droplets of water glide down her face and catch in the seam of her lips.

"This is why you're single, you know, a man should never call a woman heavy."

He squeezes a hand on her small waist. "I thought I was single because of my attachment issues, at least that's what my old therapist used to say," he says, eyes wide.

She shoves his shoulder. "Way to bring down the mood."

He wants to bite her, he realises, softly, gently, on her jaw, on her lips, he wants to peel down her bikini top and gnaw at her nipples.

"What's your excuse for being single then?" he asks, as she drags herself free and swims a few strokes away, and after he's adjusted himself in his shorts.

"Men prefer shy, retiring types," she declares.

"No they don't."

"Men don't like it when their women have more money than them."

"Some of them. I'd be quite happy to be your live-in house boy," he says, sighing wistfully to make her laugh.

They've been on these trips before when either or both of them have been coupled up with someone - though those someones never accompanied them - and it didn't change anything. If anything he thought that having the excuse of a boyfriend or girlfriend let them be more forward in their affections, but maybe that's just him.

He doesn't know what she feels, what she thinks, he can't ask her, he can only try and parse her expressions, her contrary actions. And so what if she felt the same as him, or a sliver of what he feels, so what? It's not like they'd do anything about it, it's not like they'd fall into bed with one another and ignore the fact that his father was her brother. It's all impossible anyway, so he should just stop fucking _thinking_ about it, he tells himself, as she races him to swim back to the beach, feet kicking up a spray that blinds him.

 

*

 

It's the orphanages that are the hardest for both of them to visit - Dany seeing herself and her brother in every child, Jon seeing himself in the quiet boys who shy away suspiciously from any kindness - and he hides himself behind his camera, praying that he won't have to interact much with the children, that he can get through the day without falling apart.

She cries on the drive back to their hilltop hotel and he holds her in his lap, stroking a hand down her hair, feeling an answering lump in his throat, and when they get to their room, he runs a bath for her and washes her hair as she sits in the water with her arms around her knees, staring ahead with dead eyes, and then he cleans her back and shoulders carefully with a sponge as if he could wash away all her hurt.

He's seen her naked before, when she's getting changed, when they've skinny-dipped, but when she's like this it doesn't feel the same, he doesn't lust after her, doesn't feel anything but a purer kind of tenderness.

"Let's do something for you tomorrow," she says, when they lie in their separate beds, the hum of the wonky ceiling fan blending with the sound of crickets and birds outside their open window.

"Why not something we both want to do."

"And what's that?"

"Go dancing in Meereen. Oberyn's visiting too this week."

"He didn't tell me that."

"Yes he did," Jon says, yawning, "you just didn't check your phone."

"That's what you're here for on these trips, checking phones."

"It'll be good to see him, he always cheers you up."

"He's my favourite relation, you know," she says and he can hear her smile.

"He is, is he, and who am I?" he asks, and then licks his dry lips as he hears what he said seem to hover in the air above them. Who is he to her, really.

"You're Jon, my Jon," she murmurs and he waits for her to say more, for him to work up the courage to say more, but she starts to snore and he gusts a sigh and hits his head against his pillow. _Coward_ , he mouths to the ceiling.

 

*

 

He's drunk, but so is everyone else in the bar clinging to the side of the old Kandaq pyramid, the thump of the base, the cries and cheers from the dancefloor, spilling out above the streets of Meereen. He's downed so much apricot wine that his lips are almost numb with heady sweetness, that he keeps throwing his arms around people's shoulders even if he doesn't know them, that he's stolen two pack of cigarettes from two separate bags left open on tables and then gifted them to so many raised hands that he's only had the chance to smoke two himself and is currently scanning the room to steal a third when his eyes land on her, on Dany, dancing up on some mountain of a man and he groans in his throat so loudly that the woman next to him gives him a strange look.

"Having a good night?" Oberyn calls out as he comes up behind him.

"Yup," Jon says distractedly.

"She's something, isn't she."

"She is."

"You two should stop in Sunspear on your way back," he says. Sunspear where Oberyn keeps dropping unhelpful hints about sex clubs which Jon would rather die than visit with Dany.

"We don't have time, it's a tight schedule."

Oberyn raises a perfect eyebrow. He's unfairly handsome and Jon would hate him for it except that he's also the nicest dude ever.

"This is on the schedule," he protests, motioning to the club with a wave of his hand. But when he looks back across the dancefloor Dany is gone. "I better go find her," he says.

"Mother hen," Oberyn calls as Jon barrels through the crowd.

He doesn't know why he's going after her, she's probably humping her new companion up against a wall somewhere, her tongue down his throat. The strobe lights make his eyes hurt, his stomach feels sore, and he loses his patience as a man knocks into him, pushing him back hard and ignoring his outraged shouts.

He spills out onto the balcony, having failed to find her in either room, or the corridors, or the woman's bathroom that he strode through to shrieks from the girls and a slurred offer of a phone number from a blonde whose friends were fixing her makeup in front of the mirror.

Dany's pale hair makes her easy to spot, alone by the edge of the balcony, leaning her arms over the railing, hips swaying to the music. She's wearing a sequined dress tonight that's so short she's flashed him several times already so that he knows what's underneath, the women's boxer-briefs that have played a key role in many of his fantasies.

"Alright?" he asks, his voice too loud for the relative quiet out here.

"I'm fine," she says, turning her head to smile at him. Her lips are reddened from the wine just like his.

"He wasn't to your taste?" he says, settling on his elbows beside her.

"No," she scoffs, "he kept calling me his sweet sugar baby."

"That doesn't do it for you? It would do it for me," he jokes and she laughs and leans her head against his shoulder.

"There's plenty more fish in the sea here tonight," she says and then fixes him with a look, her eyes glittering, "we'll have to find you a girl."

"I've found one already," he says, putting an arm around her shoulder, hating himself for trying to play it off as a joke.

"Do you like these trips we do, Jon?" she asks, suddenly serious.

"I love them, Dany," he says, cupping a hand to her cheek. "They're my favourite part of the year," he confesses.

"Mine too," she says with a small smile. "Do you think we'll still enjoy them when we're in our sixties?"

"You plan to employ me for that long? I'll have shaky hands by then, or cameras won't exist anymore." When they're sixty, when they're seventy, when his hair is grey to match her white, what will they be like, what will she be like, what will their lives have been like. "You might be too busy with grandchildren by then."

"I'll never be too busy for you," she says earnestly, as his thumb strokes across her chin, as his eyes flick between her eyes and her mouth.

Maybe he could just kiss her, is what he always thinks when he's drunk, maybe that would solve everything - and how, his sober self asks the next morning, relieved that he hasn't given in to such a stupid thought and sent her running from him.

"Come and dance," she says then, grabbing him by the hand and pulling him inside, into the flashing gloom, the heaving mass of people.

She turns her back to him and his hands move automatically around her waist, his face drops to the bare curve of her neck as she rocks her hips back into him.

 _You drive me crazy_ , he mouths against her skin, as she laces her fingers in his, the both of their hands guiding her hips now, as he grinds himself against her arse, feeling pretty sure that she can feel how hard he is.

They're staying in some fancy hotel nearby that Oberyn booked them and when they stagger back, dizzy and drunk, she whips her dress off the moment they cross the threshold of their room, and he pauses where he stands by the sideboard, hand reaching for the bottle of water waiting there. They haven't turned the lamps on and the city lights spill in through the open curtains, lighting up her pale skin, revealing the hard points of her nipples and her tight black briefs.

"Dany," he says, his voice thick, as she stands there looking at him and makes no move to grab her sleeping t-shirt or dive under the covers of her bed.

"You know why we can't," she says.

"I know," he says bitterly. "So get into bed, put some clothes on or something."

"Every time I think about it," she continues softly, coming closer as he stays rooted to the spot, sweat pooling in his back, mouth dry, "I can't get it to work, I can't see a path forward, an afterwards. We do this," she says, touching a hot hand to his chest as he inhales sharply, bringing his own hand to her shoulder, thinking that she'll push him away at any moment, "and what do we do then, you know?" she says, sounding young.

His hand is trembling where it touches her, his chest is tight. "I know," he says, "of course I know. But I want to," he says, unwilling to let this conversation, eight years in the making, pass without saying something, without making his desire plain. "I want you, Dany, and I know it's wrong." He fingers a tendril of her hair, follows it down to her breast, glancing his thumb across her nipple once before pulling back with a jerk and clenching his fists by his side.

"It's just us two and I don't want to ruin it, I don't want to lose you," she says.

"You wouldn't lose me, no matter what happens, I swear on my life."

She pats his chest, over his heart. "You're too good for me."

He laughs bitterly. "Me? Now that's a lie."

They stare at one another for a long moment as a loud moped passes underneath their window.

"It's going to be worse now, now that we've talked about it, won't it," she says knowingly.

"Probably."

"And both of us are thinking the same thing right now, aren't we," she says wryly, her mouth twisting. "That this was the first step, that we'll give in one day, one summer."

He nods.

She snorts and then tips up on her toes and presses a kiss to his cheek as he holds his breath, his hands hovering over her back without touching, and then she steps back and pads over to her bed, pulling on the baggy t-shirt he bought her years ago in the wolfswood gift shop. "An early day tomorrow," she says, in a mimic of his usual refrain.

"Yeah," he says, as she slips under the covers.

He pulls off his t-shirt and jeans, wondering if she's watching him, hoping she is, and gets into bed, downing his bottle of water as he lies there, heart still racing, cock still hard, before he throws the empty bottle towards the bin.

"Night, Jon," she murmurs.

"Night," he says, wondering just how many hours the both of them will stay awake, silent and waiting, and just how many years, months, weeks, or days, it will be until they give in.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> please comment if you enjoyed this, I'd love to hear what people think! :)
> 
> This story is complete as it is because I prefer to leave it on an open ending.
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable photoset for this story [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/176665613657/if-you-wanted-to-take-on-some-of-the-family)


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